THE ENGLISH LITERARY LEFT
21
Such lines, and there are many such in the later poems, can only be
interpreted as
warnings.
Politics and Bohemia
A few years ago, in "A Hope for Poetry", Day Lewis cited as models
for the Auden circle those rare poets of modern Britain who, rooting them·
selves in monasteries or universities, had refused to be plucked up, trans–
planted to the gardens of popular culture, and there domesticated. Today
this disciple of Gerard Hopkins occupies a post on the Book Society with
Sir Hugh Walpole and
J.
B. Priestley. Lewis is an extreme case, and he has
perhaps landed in the place reserved for him by his essential talents. But
Auden as playwright, parodist and author of amusing travel books has a
foot in Bloomsbury too, and Spender is the intensely busy poet and publicist
of petit-bourgeois democracy.
In recoiling from the years of militancy into the variegated social and
psychologicai reformism of the present, they have made a political truce
with the bourgeoisie; and a younger literary generation in England already
suspects them of having made an esthetic truce as well. Politics has razed
Bohemia and replaced its strict tabus with the rough and ready touchstones
of parties engaged in the struggle for power and influence. So long as the
Stalinist grouping, for which the Auden circle writes, preserved its revolu–
tionary and class character, it constituted a collectivity with homogeneous
social values, to which the Auden circle were free to bring their own
esthetic. Both camps gained from the connection:
New Verse
was a "little
magazine" with a social conscience, and
Left Review
a political journal with
a mature attitude towards the arts. But as the Stalinist grouping, in quest
of the Democratic Front, expands beyond its original base, cutting across
lines of class, interest and value, the Auden circle finds itself addressing an
audience which embraces a social field so large that it is practically commen–
surate with society as a whole. And what is society as a whole but capitalist
society, what are its values but the values of the bourgeoisie?
